In noisy squalor that overflows Commons corridors, newsmen in the Ottawa press corps struggle against time to cover the nation's biggest stories —and mostly they do it well. June Callwood tells how they get and give usBy June Callwood

IT WAS GETTING monotonous. We had flown more than two hundred miles out over the North Atlantic from the Newfoundland coast and seen only grey sky and greyer water. I was in the cockpit of the DC3. Captain Vince Keyes had lent me his seat. Copilot Syd Greeley was beside me at the controls.

WHEN I WAS A SCHOOLBOY in Toronto, I wasn’t very good at things like dates of coronations or the forming of parliaments, but whenever I read something like. “At last the right man was found for the job, Samuel de Champlain, a hardy sailor from Brouage in Brittany,” I'd hear the creaking of masts and crash of seas and look out over Percy Waters Florists or O’Leary’s grocery store to a little village in France with haystacks, chickens and cows delightfully located right outside the back doors, and I'd resolve that some day I was going to go there.

THE PIANO THAT OSCAR PETERSON, the Canadian jazz musician, played during his concert at Massey Hall in Toronto late last January was his own — a sleek, black, seventy-five-hundred-dollar Steinway grand that, on the platform stage, suggested nothing so much as a finely tooled racing car.By Jack Batten

AT TWO O’CLOCK one morning last month Quebec’s Premier Jean Lesage was still at work — though he had to be, and was, at his downtown office only six hours later for an early committee meeting. What kept him up late was an odd task for the head of a government.By Blair Fraser

I HAVE JUST finished perusing your magazine of February 20 and have noticed with astonishment the cartoon on page 4, headed “Pearson and Diefenbaker: Shades of World War I.” You have shown Mr. Diefenbaker in the uniform of the German Army, and I cannot understand how you can suggest that he is other than the most loyal and fervent Canadian.

THERE HAS NEVER been a time in our history when the need for constitutional change has been so widely discussed. There has never been a time when so many authorities have outlined so many plans for bringing our constitution into line with the needs of a modern bi-national state.

AN OFFICIAL government handbook on Cyprus opens with this cheerful greeting: “The Cyprus people welcome the UN International Peace Keeping Force with feelings of relief and absolute confidence.” If Canadian soldiers there could bring themselves to believe that, they would be far happier than they are.By ALEX BARRIS

THE FOUR LONELIEST people in Canada must surely be the two representatives of the Chinese news agency, Peking, and their wives, who share a modest apartment in downtown Ottawa. Not that they complain of any unfriendly treatment by Canadians — quite the contrary.By Blair Fraser

WASHINGTON: A little-known ventriloquist named Russ Lewis got a big laugh on the Hollywood Palace TV show recently with this gag: Q.: Where is the capital of the United States? A: All over Europe! That may sound like a familiar old joke, but the fact is it fits the new mood here far better than a gibe at, say, the super-patriots of the John Birch Society.By KNOWLTON NASH

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